


And The Endless Skies

by Jenwryn



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Golden Age (Narnia), I feel like I should be tagging this Lucy/Narnia okay, Interspecies, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-29
Updated: 2012-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-13 03:19:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And the moon and the stars were gifts<br/>You gave to the dark and the endless skies</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Endless Skies

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to my alpha-reader, they know who they are. Written for the kink_bingo square "washing/cleaning". The title (and four words in the fic) from [The Flaming Lips and Amanda Palmer's version of 'The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face'](http://vimeo.com/48139630) (link is NSFW). I really hope that I don't need to further clarify that this is a grown-up Lucy, a Queen Lucy, from their reigning years.

The battle had gone but tolerably, and Lucy has spent hours on her rounds, skirts in one hand and healing cordial in the other. Drop, drop; watch as they wake and breathe and gasp, all bruise-free and brilliant. It’s never not wondrous, though it really should be. It should be as ordinary as the lines on her hands, or the way the sun cups the hills and tent tops before slipping away to the edge of the world. Even aching with the bruises of battle, it’s wondrous. Wondrous, to herself, and to others. Lucy can feel their eyes upon her, as she leaves the battlefield, and as she passes through the camp. She slips away, regardless; away from the talk and the fires and the sweet scent of stews and berries. It’s autumn in Narnia, earth rich beneath her shoes, twigs cracking dry with leaves as she picks her way across them. There’s a voice, behind her, but it’s only Ed, and he’s not like the others; he will pay heed, but will not let her absence halt him, as writes the latest missive to their High King brother ( _all is well, but only just; the foe continues to rally_ ). Lucy lifts her palm to him, as she pauses with her hip to a tree, and watches him smile in response. The tree’s bark is warm through her cloak. She shivers, and steps away; steps deeper into darkness.

The woods are waiting for her tonight. The woods are always waiting. Trees bend and bow, too subdued for dancing, but there’s a grace to them, as leaves brush her face, her hair; as leaves catch, and fall, all gold and grey and auburn. Lucy slips off her cloak. Slips off her shoes. Leaves a dagger on a branch, and a short-sword on boulder; moss dry and pale and brittle. Lucy knows she does not need her weapons. She knows they will be in her tent in the morning, polished, on the chest by the bed with its curtains of velvet and wool, its the blankets of fur and linen. Lucy loosens the laces of her dress, too, letting it slip to her hips, then drop to the ground, a crush of silk bruised with other creatures’ blood. The air is cool, and bumps rise on her skin, soft hairs shifting. The breeze keens to her, and she lets her braid down. She smells the grit of fighting on it: the weight of smoke, of shouting, of watching swords clash with claws and claws clash with fangs. Sometimes, sometimes, Lucy remembers the battles from where she’d been born - the news of them, tinny on the wireless, of a city boarded up and shaking - but she cannot imagine them, cannot picture them without fox at side of bear at side of brother. There is blood on her shirt, though; rust-red on her blouse-sleeves, where it is not her own, and darkened to black by her ribs, where it is, and she supposes that that much must be the same, whichever world one falls in.

Not here, though, for falling, nor for blood. Not here, in the woods, at night, where the trees spread their branches when she glances to the sky. The moon is but a sliver, the tease of a Calormene blade, yet the stars, oh, the stars; the stars are so bright she can almost hear them sing in the dip behind her ears. Dark blue wool, thick and safe, with light stitched in.

The stream is a vein amongst the trees. Water bleeds like warriors do, but cooler. Lucy’s toes tingle as she slips them in. She tastes the dust on her lips, flavour stronger, as the cold fresh smell of the water rises around her. She is dusty, as she shrugs her blouse to the ground. She is bloody, as the cloth sticks to cuts and to gashes. She is tired, as she hangs her underthings from the low droop of a willow. Susan would not like it, to see Lucy on the field of battle, as Ed allows. No, as Ed must accept, not allow. But Lucy knows she is safe, in this land, with this rich soil beneath her. With this river swirling at her feet, reflecting her image up at herself; hair awry; dark blood and darker bruises.

The stones in the stream are smooth, paper weights beneath the arches of her feet, beneath the spread of her toes. She toys with them, then feels the water warm a little, as the clear shapes of naiads rise up amongst red-tipped rushes on the opposite bank, straight like spears. The naiads sway with the water, and with the reeds. Their breasts are smaller than her own, but look softer, gleaming like milk-opals, flowing with the water that shapes them and makes them. Lucy would know how they taste, and so she walks closer, easing herself towards the centre of the stream, where the bed dips sharply deeper. The current laps at her calves, at her knees, at her thighs, washing away the day, and the fight, and the redness from her shoes and from kicking and being kicked. She eases herself deeper, her aches and bruises, raw against her body, lessening, as the water rises around her, skittering faster and higher over the rocks downstream. The lick of the water, against the tight fuzz of hair between her legs, makes her gasp for air.

Lucy needs this. Needs the land to make her clean again. Needs the stream to push the battle from her mind.

The wood curves in around her. The willow stoops closer, lithe dryad stepping out with a swirl of fine yellow leaves. Some cling to the crown of Lucy’s hair, where it is still dry. The dryad twirls, watches, as the river bathes Lucy. Water, waterfingers, river and naiads, river and breeze, river and the night that dips closer to her, the stars brighter as she leans upwards, as she lets the world touch her, brush her, curl its embrace around her shoulders and her hips and her moon-white breasts. Her nipples grow large, at the cold of the stream, at its motion against them, swelling. Lucy thinks of a faun she had bathed with, some seasons before, after they’d danced; bacchanalia, beneath the light of a fatter moon. There had been sparks from a bonfire, shooting upwards, and Peter and Ed had laughed with bellies full of cider and their mouths red with kissing, and Lucy had pushed between a pliant tree and the eager faun, and it had been fierce and good and wild and right, and the faun and she had bathed each other, afterwards, and his faun penis had floated upwards, eager for the water’s surface, bobbing. It had been red, dark against the shaggy hair that would have kept it hidden, but for the water, and but for him already being full again with the wanting of Lucy. Lucy likes how penises nudge her, faun and man’s alike; likes how they twitch and need and ask.

Lucy likes the swell of the river, too, however; she drifts in its hold, and in the songs of the naiads, so low as to be barely heard against the swish of the trees. She embraces it. Embraces the touch of the willow that creeps around her, wrapping, strong, against the kin strength of her own arms, of her own back, as she floats, now, her legs wide beneath the starlight. The waterfingers dance against her. Washing, washing, bathing her cleaning, coaxing the dirt of the day and the battle and the blood and the dying, coaxing it from her skin and from beneath her skin, from her breasts and from her heart. Naiad hands slide against the soft of Lucy’s thighs, to kiss and to push, to thrum inside of her. Lucy’s back dips in the water, stream rushing between her breasts, her hair fanning outwards. Her mouth opens to the stars, as she sucks at watery lips and watery fingers, and she floats, and she floats. Floats, and the water fills her, and the water loves her, as a faun might, as a man might, pressing first between her legs and then within her, and lapping against her, until she calls out with the pleasure swelling over her, swelling inside of her, swelling around her, and the night cries out in harmony because she is safe in this land, and she is loved by this land, and oh, and oh. The water washes over her, kisses her clean, kisses her skin until the willow scoops her out and safe, into the dark and the endless skies, and Lucy sleeps. Sleeps, soft and warm in the sweet earth and the dry leaves, and she will wake, on the morrow, bruise-free and brilliant.  



End file.
